It is the rare architect who can bring tradition to life and make ancient forms feel new. But the blending of traditional craftsmanship with contemporary ideas has become a hallmark of Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, whose 200-person office is designing the 2020 Olympic stadium in its home city of Tokyo. “Some architects totally deny the tradition and just try to find new things,” says Sadafumi Uchiyama, the garden curator at the Portland Japanese Garden. “Kengo Kuma is very deeply rooted in Japanese tradition.”
Kengo Kuma’s house for Portland Metro’s Street of Dreams blends indoors and outdoors as well as Western and Japanese architectural elements.
Kuma’s reputation and affection for natural landscapes made him an obvious first choice for the recent expansion of the Portland Japanese Garden, says Stephen Bloom, the garden’s CEO. In 2008, Bloom flew to Tokyo to persuade Kuma to consider the commission. By then, the architect was in high demand, completing buildings around the world. But Kuma accepted Bloom’s invitation to visit Portland. “Once he saw Portland Japanese Garden, the project sold itself,” Bloom says. It became the architect’s first work in the United States.
Kuma’s work, which is characterized by the playful use of natural and humble materials, particularly wood, exhibits a deep respect for Japanese building methods and ancient techniques even as it explores new forms and material assemblies. For the Tokyo outpost of Sunny Hills, a purveyor of Taiwanese pineapple cakes, Kuma wrapped the two-story retail space in a three-dimensional wooden lattice, constructed using a type of Japanese wood joinery called jigoku-gumi, which requires no screws, nails, or glue. In Nomi City, for the offices of textile-maker Komatsu Seiren, Kengo Kuma and Associates drew on the local tradition of rope- braiding for carbon-fiber rods used to create a curtain that wraps the building and stabilizes the structure in the event of an earthquake.
The expansion at the Portland Japanese Garden, which was completed in 2017, is a modern interpretation of monzen- machi, the arrangement of a Japanese town around a temple, inspired by the topography and visitor sequence that already existed at the garden. The buildings, which are arranged around a central courtyard, house art, a library, a classroom, and other spaces and include a dramatic, cantilevered tea house. “Our theme for the entire project was, we don’t need to do much,” recalls Uchiyama, who designed three new gardens as part of the expansion. Kuma and Uchiyama approached the project like a pair of sculptors, Uchiyama says, removing only what was necessary for the village to take shape.
To say that the new buildings disappear into the forest is an exaggeration, but in their low profile and diaphanous, wood- slat walls, they exemplify the Japanese art of blurring indoors and outdoors and exude a sort of Zen-like serenity. The contemporary pagoda-style roofs, the higher of which are covered in a local sedum to de-emphasize the architecture and preserve views from the garden’s iconic Moon Bridge, further intensify the feeling that the buildings are merely shelters placed in the landscape. Kumass approach, Uchiyama says, was to do nothing more than “put a roof over the land.”
Both are showcases of Kuma’s attention to detail and craft. The restaurant space juxtaposes traditional Japanese elements, like rock gardens and (optional) floor seating, with contemporary furnishings and flair. Most notable at the restaurant are the elegant sudare, woven bamboo screens, which are hung from the ceiling sideways instead of in their usual vertical orientation, a simple gesture that is at once sculptural and functional, traditional yet playful. The house, meanwhile, has a wide range of elegant wood elements woven throughout alongside modern technology deployed to enhance the owner’s connection to nature. Columns were removed from the corners of the house to offer panoramic views from within a single room, while deep eaves and floor-to-ceiling glass blur the lines between indoor and outdoor spaces.
For one year, these buildings made Portland the only city in the United States with a Kengo Kuma-designed building. Then, in 2018, Dallas joined the list, opening the seven-story, twisting Rolex Building, which was designed by both Kuma and Portland Japanese Garden’s Uchiyama (who is also trained as a landscape architect). In Portland, Bloom sees Kuma’s work as setting a new bar for the city, “which is quickly growing into a global city,” he says. “I think Kengo Kuma embodies where Portland has been and where it is going.”
For the expansion of Portland’s Japanese Garden, Kengo Kuma’s approach was to do nothing more than put a roof over the land according to garden curator Sadafumi Uchiyama.